


the recognition scene

by kosy



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Incineration, M/M, Mexico City Wild Wings (Blaseball Team) - Freeform, Relationship Study, Season/Series 07, anyways. did you guys hear that miguel wheeler hit a single after getting incinerated, the inherent tragedy of being essentially forgotten
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28065993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy
Summary: The Wings get on base a total of three times that entire game. They lose 1-7. Five players are struck by Jaylen’s pitches. It is the highest number of players to ever be hit in one game.By some miracle, there are no incinerations, but even Miguel doesn’t bother with optimism. The next day is forecasted as blooddrain, but the game after that will be played under another dark sky, and nobody’s stupid enough to think they’re all getting out of that alive.
Relationships: Axel Cardenas/Miguel Wheeler
Comments: 10
Kudos: 27





	the recognition scene

**Author's Note:**

> hey everyone! i am having Thoughts and Feelings about obscure players. also the fact that the wings didn't have a single roster change until game 109 of season 7. also the fact that their unofficial motto is "anything can happen".
> 
> re:content stuff to be aware of, this fic has drinking and description of incineration in it. also i don't have miguel as a literal wheel the way he's depicted on the wiki. very sorry for that one but if he's gonna date a human, as is also implied on the wiki, i would like him to be a human person too as opposed to a tire piloted by several white rats
> 
> also, shoutout to reblase, this fic rly wouldn't be what it is without that resource. the title's from "the recognition scene" by the mountain goats because i am very predictable but also because it fits. enjoy the read!

i. Pretty much no one believes it when the Wild Wings finish a season with a win-loss record over .500. It feels like somebody’s made a mistake, like they snuck something past the gods, because seriously, what the hell? They’ve got no right making it as far as they have. The league’s on fire beneath them and everybody’s just waiting for the next horror to hit and the Wings are gathered around the wobbly table in Burke’s apartment, toasting to victory (and to each other, and also to Burke for buying the beer in the first place). None of it feels real, but it is, somehow, and none of them know what the hell to do with  _ that _ so they drink and laugh and pass out in an unruly pile of limbs on Burke’s carpet, and the next day they pick themselves up and haul out to Kansas City for the first game of the postseason. 

Lots of blaseball fans say there’s nothing good about playing for the Wings, but that’s because nobody knows jack shit about the Wings. 

High on the list of good things about playing for the Wings, actually: nobody knows jack shit about the Wings. 

It keeps them safe. That’s what Axel figures. You can’t quit blaseball, so the second best thing you can do is stick with the team nobody gives a damn about. That’s how it all goes wrong anyway—getting noticed. He knows what happens to the Jessica Telephones of this world. The Nagomi Mcdaniels. The York Silks. The Jaylen fuckin’ Hotdogfingerses. 

So, yeah, it’s kinda weird making it to the playoffs for the first time. Having people give the Wings a second look for once. 

But listen, Axel can’t really complain. It’s nice to have the rest of the league baffled.  _ How did  _ they _ get here? _ Total afterthoughts to actual contenders. 

Feels good. 

ii. Miguel’s beaming like an idiot through their first set of games against the Breath Mints. “Dude, we  _ did _ it!” he keeps on saying to nobody in particular, “We  _ made _ it!” 

Axel snorts and knocks his shoulder against Miguel’s while he’s on his way up to bat. “Calm down, man,” he says. “This ain’t anywhere near over yet.” Game one of the postseason isn’t exactly the champion title. The smile doesn’t go away, though, doesn’t even waver; Miguel just flips him off and shoves him toward the field, grinning. 

But then Axel Cardenas, two-star-batter extraordinaire, steps up to the plate and hits a two-run homer and the Wings take the game 5-4, so really what the hell does he know anyway? 

iii. The real weird thing is how normal the playoffs are. Yeah, they usually wouldn’t play for the best of five, but at the end of the day it’s just an extra game or two, and they played the Breath Mints during the regular season plenty. They beat the Mints after four games and they move on to the semifinals, and the world should feel flipped upside down. It sorta does. But they all still go back to the hotel at night, still drink cheap corner store liquor, still order way-too-expensive room service to pair with the cheap corner store liquor. Axel still rooms with Miguel, same as it’s been since season one.

As usual: a cramped double room with two beds and one bathroom, doesn’t matter what hotel they stay at. People’d been pissy about giving up their personal space back at the start, but Burke Gonzales was a practical man—that was one thing that didn’t change even when he got alternated—and not one easily persuaded, so they’d all sucked it up by the end of the first year and gotten used to it.

Axel’s never minded much. Miguel’s a good guy anyway, more than Axel really knows what to do with. Earnest and kind and fucking  _ incessantly _ chatty, and somehow none of that annoys him even though it’s kind of the opposite of his own whole deal. Good guy, shitty roommate—always in Axel’s space, getting crumbs in his sheets, leaving stuff scattered all over the bathroom counter—but he doesn’t care about that either. Worse things in the grand scheme. They get along. More than get along. 

Always have, honestly. Ever since Miguel latched onto him during the months of spring training before the first season started over five years ago now. He just sat down next to Axel in the dugout, struck up a conversation, and apparently imprinted on him like a fuckin’ baby duck. 

Usually Axel would’ve shook off any hangers-on like Miguel within minutes of meeting them; usually that much eager kindness on anybody seems fake; usually he would’ve spent the last however many years tolerating him at best. But whatever. Miguel’s always been an exception. And it’s not like Axel’s complaining. 

“Hey,” Miguel says from where he’s draped across his own bed with a beer held level to his chest, that easy wide grin still crinkling his eyes up at the corners. “D’you think we’re gonna win this thing?” 

“Stop asking me that, man,” he complains, “you’re gonna fuckin’ jinx it,” and then pauses. There are plenty of things Axel could say here:  _ actually I’m scared of what happens next, Miguel, I don’t think we should’ve gotten as far as we have, you know we’ve never had a roster change, we get one day free tomorrow while the Garages and Thieves battle it out for a spot in the semifinals but if the Thieves  _ lose _ that game, Miguel, then we play against the goddamn undead pitcher we never would’ve even met otherwise and Miguel, I don’t know if you’ve checked the forecast this week but— _

“But. Yeah. I think we’ve got a good shot,” he finally tells him, careful. “‘Anything can happen,’ right?”

Miguel’s smile widens, and he sets his beer down. “‘Anything can happen.’ See? Didn’t kill you to be an optimist for once, Cardenas.” 

That’s an argument they’ve had so many times it’s more habitual than anything else, comfortable as any well-worn jacket. Axel’s just fine not being an optimist about this game. He hasn’t cared about blaseball since—well, since he got drafted into it in the first place, if he’s gonna be honest. He’s not a great hitter and doesn’t care too much about getting better. Once people started dying violently, frequently and completely at random, his apathy turned into active hatred. Which he thinks is pretty reasonable, even if the losses never touched the Wings. 

Besides. Bright-eyed naivety or hope for a better future or  _ whatever _ never made anyone less dead. Only necromancy and more names in the Hall can do that, apparently. Death feeds death feeds death. 

“C’mere,” he says instead of bothering to try and put anything he’s been thinking about in the last few minutes into words, then sets his can down on the nightstand too. Miguel swings his legs off his bed and hops to his feet, just tipsy enough for the movement to be a little sloppy. Axel snorts. “You good?” 

“We made it to the fuckin’  _ semifinals,” _ Miguel says by way of reply, crossing the small gap between their beds. He kneewalks over the sheets to the headboard Axel’s resting against, and he leans down to kiss him, palms warm and just a little sweaty where they come to rest on his face. 

iv. When he and Miguel kissed for the first time, they both saw it coming. Had for weeks. Hard to ignore, sharing a room each night; they touched each other way too much and held eye contact way too long for it to just be chill dudebro friendship. The revelation that he was into Miguel didn’t throw Axel too much. It was just another thing that would happen eventually, and he was fine with waiting, happy with it. They were friends. That’d always be enough. 

It ended up happening after some season two game, though if anyone asked Axel now he wouldn’t be able to say which one. They were lying in bed together the way they did most nights, limbs half-overlapping, talking about whatever came into their heads. Or, more accurately, Miguel’s head. Axel mostly just listened, but he was happy with that too. 

That night it was how the damn commentators wouldn’t stop calling Miguel Mike— _ It’s Miguel, _ he’d snapped, enunciating the two syllables clearly,  _ Mi-guel, it’s my  _ name,  _ it’s not like it’s hard _ —and Axel dropped a hand onto his bare shoulder where his t-shirt had ridden up, and Miguel stopped talking, just like that, and turned his head to look at Axel. There was that beat of uncertainty, yeah, but the room was lit dim yellow by the bedside lamp and it was muggy in New York City that night and they could hear the sound of people in the streets, even at one in the morning, and they knew each other, they were friends and it was good, all good. Miguel pushed himself up onto an elbow and put his hand on Axel’s cheek and leaned down and kissed him, simple and sweet, and when he began to pull back, unsure, Axel tugged him back in. 

So it was easy and casual and also more than casual, but Axel didn’t worry about it much. Sometimes they slept together after games and sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they went out on dates and sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they talked about their feelings and sometimes they didn’t. But Axel hasn’t been with anyone else since whatever day of season two that was, and he knows Miguel hasn’t either. Just haven’t wanted to. They’re together as much as anybody could be together living the life that they do, and sometimes he looks at Miguel and feels something so intense, something so vast and unnameable, it scares him speechless, and it’s. What it is.

At first, sure, it was scary to care about somebody like  _ that _ in a world like  _ this. _ But at a certain point  _ anything can happen _ started to feel more like a cheer than the warning it had been from the start. 

v. The moon blots out the sun over Seattle. It’s hard to see much of the field, and the crowd is eerie-quiet before the game even starts, some animal instinct. Even the birds stop singing. 

In the semidark, Burke runs a thumbnail over the stitching of a blaseball, tearing at the threads until they go frayed. He’s not pitching today, but he’s here regardless. Silent support, or something close to it. 

Burke doesn’t tell the team to be safe. There’d be no point in that.

They all watch from the dugout as Jaylen Hotdogfingers walks up to the mound. She cuts an imposing figure against the halo of the eclipsed sun, tall and shadowed and inevitable. It’s a funny feeling, knowing you’re about to play against somebody who has become something like a god. It’s a funny feeling, knowing that some people look at her and probably still see a human.

She scans the stadium slowly before winding up, and her eyes catch on the dugout, and though there’s no way she can see their faces in the dark, she smiles, all teeth. She looks viciously alive. She looks skeletal.

A few practice pitches. Her throws are hard and terrifyingly fast. The catcher winces every time the ball thuds into the mitt. When they toss the ball back, even they handle it carefully. 

Axel’s stomach twists. 

vi. Yong Wright is hit with a pitch in the top of the second inning. Everybody in the dugout breathes in sharp but none of them scream or yell. Yong limps to first base, and he doesn’t make any noise either. 

vii. Bottom of the second. The Garages score on them five times in one inning. Axel shuts his eyes in the outfield and prays for strikeouts he knows won’t come. Anything, anything to make this game go quicker. 

viii. Miguel’s barely even lifted his bat to swing when the ball slams into his shoulder with a dull thud. The crowd inhales collectively but is otherwise silent, just as with every other hit. He stumbles a few steps and stares incredulously up at the pitching mound, and Jaylen gazes back at him unflinching, arms hanging loose at her sides.  _ Mike Wheeler, batter for the Mexico City Wild Wings, has been hit with a pitch thrown by the Seattle Garages pitcher Jaylen Hotdogfingers and is now Unstable, _ announces the commentator. They don’t explain further. Everybody knows what that means, even the kids in the audience. 

Miguel drops his bat to the hard-packed earth and walks to first. Axel smells smoke as he passes the dugout and almost manages to convince himself he’s imagining it. 

iv. Miguel comes back to the dugout and sits down next to Axel, blowing out a long breath. “They got my fuckin’ name wrong again,” is all he says. Axel doesn’t push it.

x. Summers Preston is hit with a pitch in the top of the sixth. Ronan Combs is hit with a pitch in the top of the ninth. 

Axel Cardenas is hit with a pitch in the top of the seventh. When he stumbles back to the dugout later on, Miguel grips his shoulder and squeezes it once, and when Axel turns his head, Miguel’s gaze is dark. Heavier than Axel has seen it before in all these years he’s gotten to look. Suddenly, he’s afraid to look away.

xi. The Wings get on base a total of three times that entire game. They lose 1-7. Five players are struck by Jaylen’s pitches. It is the highest number of players to ever be hit in one game. 

By some miracle, there are no incinerations, but even Miguel doesn’t bother with optimism. The next day is forecasted as blooddrain, but the game after that will be played under another dark sky, and nobody’s stupid enough to think they’re all getting out of that alive. 

xii. After, he and Miguel go out to a bar. Doesn’t matter which. It’s nights like these that Axel wishes he still had his truck. Going for a drive wouldn’t fix anything but it would maybe take his mind off the bruise forming on his hip—turns out getting hit by a fastball going a hundred miles per hour fuckin’  _ hurts _ —and the smell of smoke always in his nose like he’s already ablaze. But there wasn’t much of a point in owning a truck after he moved to Mexico City and started taking flights around the continent every couple days, so he’d given it to one of his little brothers the day he signed his contract and told him to take care of it or he’d kick his ass. Hopefully the threat was good enough to keep the bumper from getting any more dented, but knowing Diego, Axel doubts it. 

Of course, he hasn’t seen his family in years. Nobody in this game has. 

They aim for normalcy anyway and even manage to hit it a few times. Miguel’s more sentimental than usual, talks too much about wanting to get a dog when all this is over and his older sister and dumb shit the team had done over the years that Axel’d long since forgotten, but if he shuts off his brain he can pretend that’s just regular Miguel, talkative and openly emotional in a way Axel never really is. He’s pretty sure he laughs a few times because Miguel’s a funny guy even when they’re both on death row. He thinks Miguel laughs a few times too. 

They hold hands and rest them on the bar between each other, fingers tangled up together. Axel takes in the callouses, the crooked pinky that got dislocated one time too many in college intramurals and never healed right, the hair on his knuckles. There’s no urgency to what they do tonight because if there’s urgency then that means they’re acknowledging what’s happening, and Axel doesn’t want to acknowledge anything at all. 

xiii. Miguel Wheeler was born in San Diego and grew up there too. He spoke mostly Spanish at home and all English at school. His mother taught him to cook and his father taught him to fix up cars and his oldest sister taught him to drive. He had a dog named Ricky, some mutt of unknowable origin. There was a street cat he snuck out every night to feed leftovers to from the ages of eight to fourteen, and when the cat stopped coming to the back door, he cried in his room for an hour but didn’t tell anyone about it. He wasn’t very good at math but he latched onto art hard and splorts even harder. He writes poetry that is only sometimes terrible. He didn’t have any friends at school until he was twelve but he always lied and told his family he did. He’s owned the same pair of favorite blue jeans since he was seventeen. He went to the San Diego community college for two years, finished his associate’s in kinesiology, then joined the Wings. 

He listens to almost exclusively dad rock, and his hands are always steady. If Axel still had his pickup he’d trust Miguel to drive it. Miguel never makes fun of Axel for his shitty Spanish and he knows his favorite movies are all corny as hell and he would move into his apartment with him during the offseason if Axel ever asked, which he hasn’t and won’t. 

xiv. Miguel Wheeler is going to die tomorrow. 

Lying in the scratchy white sheets of a hotel bed with him, the knowledge is so innate that Axel can feel it in his teeth, aching and inevitable. He just  _ knows _ it somehow in the same way as he knows that he will not die with him. 

Axel is not the kind of man who gets premonitions, and he is even less the kind of man who believes them. He won’t believe these either. 

_ Anything can happen, _ he tells himself. It doesn’t feel the way it used to. 

xv. Same scene, same stadium, same blackened sky. A more even match this time. Arturo Huerta pitches for the Garages, Stephanie pitches for the Wings. They’re still the nobodies here but they aren’t ants anymore, they aren’t mortals playing against—whatever Jaylen is now. He looks at the Garages as they fan out across the field, taking their positions, and he wonders if they’re smart enough to fear her too.

The bruise on his hip has turned dark as expected, but it hurts even when he doesn’t press down on it with his fingertips and it burns in the way a bruise shouldn’t. Miguel is rubbing his own shoulder idly, eyes fixed on the field. 

xvi. The game is agonizingly normal. Axel would even call it good, if everything weren’t what it is. Summers is first up at bat and she hits a double, then scores on the sacrifice. In the top of the fourth, Axel hits a home run, bringing the Wings up 3-2. When he makes it back to the dugout, panting and trying not to grin too hard, Miguel pulls him into a hug and claps him on the back. Axel tugs him in closer than he usually would, holds onto him tight, but maybe not as close or tight as he should have. 

xvii. They hold onto their lead. Miguel, thank God, never spends too long on the field. He hits his ground outs or flyouts as fast as he can, then jogs back in, and he doesn’t look over his shoulder to see if the rogue ump is watching him go. 

xviii. When Miguel burns, he burns slow. 

At first Axel thinks it’s just his brain stretching the moment out into eternity, but when the flames erupt Miguel screams, a short, sharp burst of noise, and it’s normal, it’s not elongated, Miguel’s not dead yet but he’s  _ dying, _ and Burke’s arm shoots out to block Axel from leaping to his feet. Shoves him back down to the bench. 

“Don’t be an idiot, Cardenas,” Burke tells him, strained. Axel wants to struggle but he doesn’t, he can’t, so instead he watches. 

The crowd watches too, all stunned silence as Miguel shouts something Axel can’t make out and readies his bat to swing, face locked in a grimace. Huerta stares at him wide-eyed. Miguel shouts louder, wordless this time with cracking voice, and Huerta freezes. Then nods and winds up and throws, a perfect pitch right down the middle, and Miguel hits it straight into the outfield and José Haley dashes toward home and Miguel runs to first, and he’s burning as he runs, a brilliant awful flare of light and color. He drops to slide into the base, twists on the way down, and before he even hits the ground his body is gone, ash in the wind that scatters away in seconds. There’s someone else now, lying prone on first. 

They lift their head, blink up into the absent sun. Axel doesn’t look to see their face. 

xix. Miguel is the fourteenth and final death of the season, and the Wild Wings take the championship. People say Axel plays well in the finals. He doesn’t remember enough of them to say one way or the other and avoids all the instant replays from the entire postseason on principle. Mostly he sleeps in an empty bed and cleans up Miguel’s stuff from the hotel bathroom and ignores his new roommate’s hesitant attempts at conversation, and he knows it’s a dick move but can’t make himself care enough to do anything different. 

He never sees another playoff game after season seven. Nobody sings songs about the Mexico City Wild Wings. Nobody gives them a second look again. Axel thinks he can live with that. 

Then again, it isn’t like he has much of a choice. 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks so much for reading! i AM in fact thinking about how "lose you" refers to miguel's Actual Death once, calls him mike, and then sings about how the instability harmlessly chained to their catboy for the next two minutes. because i DO think that is objectively hilarious. also the reason it's in 19 parts is because the wild wings' major arcana card is the sun (lol), xviiii. you can find me on tumblr @fourteenthidol, and if you choose to leave a comment, it makes my day!


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